Our View: Environmental groups' misguided spending on oceans

Sunday

Sep 13, 2015 at 2:00 AM

Carlos Rafael famously and accurately predicted about five years ago that using the quota system known as catch shares in the Northeast Multispecies Fishery would drive small boats out of the water and consolidate licenses into the hands of a few.

His operation would be fine, he said, because of its size.

Now that government regulators have determined that fishermen will bear the cost of at-sea monitors, the pescatarian prognosticator has made another prediction. In a letter to the editor last week, the Oracle of the Ocean pointed out that analysis by the regulators, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, shows industry-paid monitoring will leave 60 percent of the fleet operating at a loss. By phone last week, the Waterfront Wizard predicted the requirement would further consolidate the groundfish industry into a mere handful of permit holders.

We beg Mr. Rafael’s indulgence with our playfulness, for our alliterative levity should not belie our genuine respect of his unique, invaluable insight into the fishing industry. He is, after all, known as the Codfather.

Mr. Rafael’s understanding of the multispecies fishery is significant, and his analysis is an attractive one, based as it is on experience and success.

He said he believes that monitors and catch shares create dynamics that are in conflict with the law by which the fisheries are managed, the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act. Specifically, NOAA has grown to give too little attention to the mandate that requires consideration of the impact of regulations on fishing communities. This is demonstrated both in the court’s ruling that deference to the agency’s biased administration of the act is allowed, and in the 2012 federal declaration of the fishery as an economic disaster.

We have argued before that at-sea monitors — an inspection function that the government pays for in other industries, such as meat packing — and the application of a quota system in a multispecies fishery interrupt the operation of the free market.

Hundreds of thousands of tons of allowable catch are being left in the ocean because of catch shares. A tiny fraction of those uncaught fish would bring prosperity to fishermen. With great certainty, we believe that better science will show that quotas and choke species are unnecessary. We are not advocating for deregulation. Rather, it’s time for reasonable regulation, based on firm data that address all of the mandates of the Magnuson-Stevens Act.

As an example, Mr. Rafael said by phone that one species under fishing restrictions is sanddab. Based on criteria of biomass size and three years of landings, the sanddab becomes what is colloquially referred to as a “choke species.” In other words, catching too many sanddabs while looking for another fish can send a permit holder over the quota and shut down his harvest.

Mr. Rafael is convinced that the scarce sanddab is not the result of fishermen taking too many out of the ocean, but of the fish leaving the area — maybe to follow food sources or to seek better spawning grounds as the Northeast deals with some of the most dramatically perturbed ocean temperatures on Earth.

Today, however, sanddabs are becoming more plentiful, are more difficult to avoid and are more likely to shut down fishing. Mr. Rafael says the 80 cents per pound it costs him to get the sanddabs to the dock to be sold for 60 cents per pound make the species unattractive anyway.

In a free market, fishermen are going to see a net filled with sanddab and move to another part of the ocean. They’ll judge whether it makes more sense to spend labor on discarding the bycatch or to land the fish at a loss while pursuing a more valuable species.

This minutia of the market shows how poorly devised is the current regime of management tools. Our confidence in what good data would say notwithstanding, we would not advocate wholesale changes to policy based on our certainty. We also know that the government is hardly going to be convinced to reallocate scarce funds to measure the vast, unseen worlds below the surface.

Therefore, we would call on the most powerful advocates for ocean health to put their hundreds of millions of dollars to the highest use, that is, to count the fish. Environmental groups that for two decades have solicited and spent half a billion dollars trying to restrict fishing under the narrative that the oceans are in crisis owe it to their benefactors to determine how accurate their claims are.

The lower fish landings we count at the dock can be blamed on overfishing, but it’s far more likely that the cause is the changing ocean environment. Let’s find out for sure. Let’s see if one environmental group has the integrity to actually improve fishery science by supporting good work like that being done at UMass Dartmouth’s School for Marine Science and Technology to improve the accuracy of stock assessments. Ironically, the environmental groups appear to have blamed fishermen and overlooked the true culprit of challenges in the fishery: climate change.

There is no indication that any stocks considered to have been “rebuilt” achieved that status as a result of regulations. Fish aren’t bouncing back, we would argue, they’re just swimming back. Environmental advocates have resources and leverage that could maintain sustainable fish stocks and fishing communities. It's a shame that power is misdirected.

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